Defoe turned to writing because he was an inept businessman who lost not
only his own money but his wife's substantial dowry. He became "the first
master, if not the inventor, of almost every feature of modern newspapers,
including the leading article, investigative reporting, the foreign news
analysis, the agony aunt, the gossip column, the candid obituary." He began
with a gift for amusing satirical verse, and his political opinions (he was a
determined Dissenter and an ardent supporter of William of Orange, the Whig
Party, and the Hanoverian succession) kept him busily publishing throughout his
controversy-ridden time. He was jailed, put in the pillory, always in debt, and
often in hiding from creditors. He was a government secret agent in Scotland.
He was never a part of the official literary establishment, so Mr. West cannot
provide any accounts of him by contemporary observers. He tries instead to
reconstruct Defoe through his writings, which leads to rather too much
description of the novels but works well with the miscellaneous publications
and becomes delightful when the biographer gets to Defoe's late account of
travels around Britain. He was a sympathetic observer, a self-deprecating
humorist, a bit of a fabricator, and an astonishingly shrewd prophet. Defoe's
life has steadily absorbing interest, based on the question What will the man
do next?

Mr. Andrus ran for the Idaho state senate in part because John F.
Kennedy, campaigning for the presidency, promised a better and more vigorous
country. He also wanted improvements to the local school system. He spent $11
on his campaign and became the youngest senator in Idaho history. He has since
served as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of the Interior and as governor of his state
for four terms. He considers himself a moderate conservationist, ambitious to
preserve the natural environment he loves while finding the means to support a
human population decently. He has been denounced for this stand by extremists
on both sides. A politician who is denounced by extremists left and right must
be both honest and intelligent. Mr. Andrus professes to be retired from
politics, and presumably means it, for this conversational, witty, acid memoir
will earn him more denunciations -- but then, he is rather proud of them.

The first-person narrator of this exceptionally constructed novel is
Keizo Yukawa, who represents contemporary, semi-Westernized Japan. He wears
designer suits and lives with an abstract-performance artist who appears in
Tokyo clubs as a pink-glazed doughnut. When he is offered the post of head
curator at an unfinished provincial museum, he flees his stuffy job in Tokyo
and lands in the shadow of Mount Fuji. The museum is to contain 365 views of
the mountain painted by an artist, unsuccessful in his own day, named
Takenoko -- last of the "pictures of the floating world" school. These paintings
mostly belong to the Ono family, and it is the oldest brother, the wealthy
owner of a robotics factory, who wants the museum. All the Onos are a bit mad,
and they ultimately drive Yukawa mad as well -- at least by ordinary standards.
The layout of the book is designed to agitate, if not actually madden, the
reader. Yukawa's story is paralleled, in marginal notes, by those of the other
characters, forcing eye and attention into a constant, dizzying zigzag. The
whole complicated tale is a metaphor for the author's view of modern Japanese
society as an assemblage of incompatible elements and traditions that create
psychological civil war in its citizens. If the novel's purpose is grim, its
action is lively and the symbolism is provocative.

Ms. Ernaux's memoir begins, "My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June," and from that juvenile jolt develops into a cool, factual, ironic study of life in a small town in Normandy in the 1950s. The style is
precise, detached, and stripped of all conventional ornament, but the realities
of class and money and prejudice in that time and place cut like a razor.

Admirers of Hildegard's music will find little about it in this
respectful life of the influential abbess who advised princes and plebeians,
preached to great effect, and corresponded with Popes, giving one of them what
amounted to a dressing down for negligence. The text offers little about music,
but provides considerable information on the politics of the turbulent twelfth
century, and on Hildegard's visions. She wrote, or dictated, descriptions of
what she saw along with explanations of what it meant. These texts are covered
at some length, and they are interesting for what appears to have been an
almost surrealistic gap between the visionary's highly fantastic, sharply
described images and the lucid, humane religious principles she derived from
them. There is no trace of modern skepticism in the author's treatment of
Hildegard.

It may take some patience to reach the merit of Ms. Hirsch's book. She
moved to a Boston area called Jamaica Plain, and displays the classic
Cantabrigian surprise at discovering the intelligence and efficiency and
sensibility of people who never went to Harvard. When she gets to the history
and character of Jamaica Plain, she has a good story to report and covers it
well. The area was once the equivalent of a prosperous small town, but with the
departure of local industries it declined into crime, drug dealing, arson, and
empty buildings. Stubborn old residents and energetic newcomers have reversed
the decline, some with independent action, some by forming associations and
committees, some by learning to influence city hall; and that story is an
encouraging example of what cooperation and ingenuity can do to arrest urban
decay.

Recent books by Atlanticauthors:

Around the House: Reflections on Life Under a Roof by David Owen.
Villard, 208 pages, $21.00 Portions of this book were originally written for The Atlantic.

And Both Shall Rowby Beth Lordan. St. Martin's Press/Picador,
178 pages, $21.00. Three of the stories in this collection first appeared in
The Atlantic.